A few remarks.

FRAND is iffy and potentially quite problematic. At the national and regional levels, FRAND is invariably taken to mean “reasonable to quite big companies”. Quite apart from the fact that the EU public tender framework structurally and institutionally excludes smaller shops from the vast majority of ICT-related public tenders, this conclusively excludes the indie developer from accessing the necessary rights to implement these standards. No amount of haggling over the specifics of FRAND is good enough; it needs to go or the framework is useless. If i’m wrong about FRAND, a blog post from you on the nuances would be useful to many people I think!

Another problem is what precisely falls under FRAND. This becomes important when you consider what I see as the two prerequisites for a third party to implement a standard or protocol: the right to do so, and the technical background, documentation, and all that follows. The standard itself might be open and accessible, but reference implementations and/or other vital technical prerequisites might not. Example: the Apache Foundation’s story with the Java Compatibility Kit. So it isn’t enough that the standard is open, whatever that ends up meaning.

Then there’s the issue that this whole framework only addresses domains/industries where will to standardise already exists. Vast swathes of European industry do not exhibit this characteristic for whatever reason (from my observations, one reason has been “heavy” fields with few extremely big vendors; see railways). So these industries are exempt from the benefits of standardisation simply because the market forces have not imposed upon the vendors a will to standardise. As I understand it, another example is in energy-related industries such as smart meters (happy to stand corrected on this one; only passing experience here). Apart from the fact that industries where standards do exist are flouting them in Tenders, there’s a lot of industries where the customer can’t reasonably require much in terms of openness or standardised technology due to market structural characteristics. So, perhaps a redefinition of EU market structural supervision mandate is needed. What I mean to say is, a lot of this standardisation work being done only addresses the subset of the European market where market forces already favor the customer.

I am not sure it’s useful to single Microsoft out. What share of the European wallet do they account for vis a vis collective EU public expenditure, including industries not “threatened by the commodifying effects of standardisation”? (just using vendor-speak for my own amusement there)